UFO: FLYING SAUCERS OVER BRITAIN? by Robert Chapman

THANK GOD THEY'RE STILL UNIDENTIFIED!

Sunday Express science correspondent Robert Chapman delivers this very British rundown of the flying saucer phenomenon in the United Kingdom, melding the classic UFO narrative of Kenneth Arnold through Condon with some particular UK cases. The Exeter flying cross, the Moigne Downs "craft," a silly hoax by students at Allingham, all these and more are explored by Chapman. It's a glorious time capsule and Chapman is in classic newsman mode, giving up play by play of reportage on each case. Jolly good!

UFOs at Stoke-on-Trent!

That bloody Warminster Thing shows up here, last seen in The Flying Saucerers by Arthur Shuttlewood. Chapman pokes some holes in Shuttlewood's personal experiences with the Thing, but also grants that he sees Shuttlewood as a fundamentally honest person and got along quite well when they met. Our author tries to be scrupulously fair whether dealing with hoaxes, cases of mistaken identity, or the possible genuine unknown.

Originally published as "Unidentified Flying
Objects" in 1969

Chapman thanks Gordon Creighton and Charles Bowen of the infamous Flying Saucer Review for quotations and material, and praises the FSR and contributors as "serious minded people." Anyone familair with the eclectic personages behind the Review may raise an eyebrow, but them's the breaks for midcentury Ufology.

Hardcover edition

This book was owned by Sally Pierson.

Mayflower Books, 1977 (original pub. 1969)

GENESIS by W.A. Harbinson

Very little fruit is forbidden

Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong

But you know evil is an exact science

Being carefully, correctly wrong

Author W.A. Harbinson delivers us this "true story" treatment of the flying saucer phenomena, starting with the mystery airships of the 1890s, on through foo fighters and saucer crashes, cattle mutilations and saucer cults, culminating with wunderwaffe and secret Antarctic bases revealing the terrible secret of GENESIS!

It's all very clever and meticulous but eventually collapses under its own weight, as every bit of UFO trivia must be incorporated into the increasingly top heavy narrative. What's left is less of a story and more a bullet list, and once we grasp the structure the whole enterprise is rendered plodding and turgid. Major spoilers follow, so be warned!

Our antagonist, it turns out, is a mad scientist from the 19th century, the inventor of those mysterious airships. As the years rolled on, he perfected his flying machines, ultimately making the sociopathic choice to work for Hitler's reich to reach even greater heights. His flying saucer wunderwaffe predate the now common modern formulation of Die Glocke, but as we know Nazi UFOs were nothing new in the subculture. 

From money making schemes by
run-of-the-mill neo-nazis ... 

... to poorly thought out products by model makers!

Following the fall of Berlin, our mad scientist flees to New Swabia and sets himself up with some robotized Nazi slaves and a fleet of flying saucers. Complicating things, the US government is also engineering their own crude saucers, which is a nice touch that adds some depth - no wonder UFO reports are so varied and strange, if multiple culprits are to blame. By the by, our villain has also unlocked anti-aging treatments, and a good thing too because he's coming up on 120 now! The early atmosphere of paranoia that Harbinson stokes degrades into nihilistic boredom - what horrific evil will our villain unveil next? Ho hum.

We are no monsters, we're moral people
And yet we have the strength to do this
This is the splendor of our achievement
Call in the air strike with a poison kiss

Harbinson includes an author's note and source appendix after the story, drawing heavily on the unreliable Renato Vesco, Italian ex-NASA contractor who assembled a UFOlogical history in his Intercept UFO which parallels many of the tacks taken in Genesis. Harbinson admits that much of Vesco's narrative is unsupported but no matter, it makes a good tale. He recommends a swath of UFO titles as well as WWII texts and some psi titles. Ol' Brad Steiger sneaks in with his edition of Project Blue Book - one of his stronger titles due to simply being the released Blue Book papers. His inclusion shows how the high and low mix in UFOlogy, purported hard facts mixing with innuendo and fantasy.

Over the years Harbinson has expanded his Genesis into a series, titled Projekt Saucer. For an ambitious misfire, Genesis earns one wunderwaffe out of four:

Dell Publishing, 1982 (original pub. 1980)

THE OCCULT IN THE ORIENT by Christopher Dane

Mystery man Christopher Dane takes us to the other side on the other side of the world for a sinister survey of THE OCCULT IN THE ORIENT! Nice to see a fresh face around here ... or so you would believe! Things are never what they seem in the world of the paranormal paperbacks however, and author "Christopher Dane" is none other than bad old Brad Steiger, moonlighting under yet another pseudonym. This particular title is Steiger's store brand version of John Keel's influential occult travelogue Jadoo and Dane must have been Steiger's more upmarket moniker, because Popular Library spared no expense with this volume, shelling out for some cool cover art and even a table of contents - that's almost unheard of for them!

Keel's Jadoo in several editions

A colonial haze hangs over the stories, whether we're talking phantom hitchhikers in Okinawa or a drawn out death curse afflicting an American consul's house servant in Jakarta. That servant, Djam Hari, draws the ire of a rival when he attains the rank of "Number One Boy" in US Vice Consul Robert Pierson's household. You see, Steiger informs us that "an Indonesian's position on this ladder [of servant rank] decreed the degree of respect accorded to him from his people." Djam Hari is a grown man, by the way, but Pierson and Steiger still refer to him as "boy" throughout. This casual infantilization casts a sickly pallor over the rest of the book, especially since the story drags on far too long before we get the expected ending. It's pure page padding and an especially bad sign of things to come since we're only three chapters in!

Front left is Robert Pierson, "U.S. aide"

Moving on, we start to recognize Steiger's formula as he staggers quick hits (like a "Negrito ghost child" whose disembodied voice calls to the living) between longer chapters, mostly pulled from his prior books or summarized from Fate magazine stories. Thankfully none end up as overlong as Djam Hari's tale, and Steiger is good enough to credit the original Fate writers when necessary. He gives a decent overview of the New Guinea UFO flap of 1959, when multiple Anglican missionaries and their local flocks reported seeing low flying spacecraft crewed by mysterious beings. This flap is sometimes named "the Gill Sightings" after one of the missionaries, Father William Gill. Another Fate summary follows with the very British sounding Arthur Grimble (of Her Majesty's Colonial Service) witnessing a death curse he christens as "Raku-nene madness," where the spirit of Raku-nene is called forth by a spurned man to possess the woman he desires and drive her to madness and death. The original story Steiger cites by writer E.P. Herman can be downloaded at the Luminist Archives, as part of the September 1953 issue of Fate.

Three Argentine Navy cadets have a scare when Deception Island vanishes from sight, leaving them adrift in a dingy on the open ocean! This is from another Fate article, written by one of the cadets, Carlo Bel Moro. Steiger mines the Flying Saucer Review for some UFOs over Hawaii, and then recaps Mary Margaret Fuller's piece on Balinese cremation rituals, which can also be downloaded from the Luminist Archives as part of Fate's August 1954 issue. The ghost of an executed French soldier haunts some Americans at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, having been "decapitated like a common criminal" by the cruel communists after they overran his position. Steiger laments the "fierce, though vain struggle" by the brave Frenchman, another example of the upside down moral logic of colonialism. This chapter ends with a cornball joke about the Frenchman being able to look for his own head after death because he was a radar officer. 

The ruins of Nan Madol give Steiger a chance to mention Lemuria as well as American atomic testing at nearby Enewetak Atoll, another clash between the modern space age and a mythical golden age. Steiger mines the August 1954 issue of Fate again for missionary May Elliot's experience in Tahiti with a spirit named Uratua. Strange lights in the South Pacific skies include a report by the crew of the Morgantown Victory in 1966 and a 1774 sighting off New Caledonia by the naturalist Johann Forster, recorded in a diary of Captain James Cook's second voyage. Steiger calls this "Captain Cook's sighting" though he's not named as seeing anything. That's typical ballyhoo by Steiger, and it's followed by a repeat of the invisible biting bug eyed monster of Manila, a Steiger staple through the years. The hoaxed Monongahela sea serpent report is also here, again, having just been seen in Weird Unsolved Mysteries by Steiger writing as Eric Norman. Burton Klein, an American GI in Vietnam, saves his wife Janice from a car accident 9,000 miles away with an ESP message. Another GI, WWII veteran A.R. Thompson, relates his story from the May 1955 issue of Fate about a disembodied voice that has saved him from plane crashes and car accidents.

And now Steiger really starts to recycle, with four straight chapters of Max Freedom Long and his manufactured Huna magic! It's a good chunk of pure nonsense padding. After this, another headless ghost visits soldier Lawrence Stevens in Seoul and performs a gruesome show, holding up his own head and saying "I'll sure be glad when these three months are up!" Later Stevens realizes that the ghost predicted the end of the Korean War! Steiger stretches the definition of "the Orient" when he profiles Komar the Hindu Fakir, whose real name was Vernon Craig and who hailed from Ohio, USA. Komar performed feats of endurance in character, and there's a brief but touching post at the Magician's Forum by someone who remembers him. Steiger and Komar would later coauthor a book, seen below:

Komar, aka Vernon Craig

The occidental fascination with Eastern thought continues with Steiger's next subject, the Master Subramuniya, who was born Robert Hansen in California before a religious experience at the age of 6 inspired him to walk the path of enlightenment. After reaching Sannyasa in Sri Lanka, Subramuniya eventually opened an ashram in Hawaii, where Steiger catches up with him. Steiger doesn't spill much ink over the guru, just noting that he disapproves of drug use and and is happy to see more young people meditating. Disappointing that this intriguing man doesn't deserve more than a quick filler chapter, while Max Freedom Long gets five whole chapters to to peddle his fraudulent "Huna" magic. You can tell that Steiger is just looking to fill pages now. Author and photographer Wilmon Menard stars in another long story of murder and magic in Tahiti which is padded with pulp fiction prose by Steiger.

Did I say five chapters of Huna bull? Yes I did, because Steiger now slips in "Huna Healing Techniques" as if realizing he still has some content to fill before the end. And after this is another telepathic warning, saving soldier John E. Rebel Thomas from death at Guadalcanal. American missionary and CIA operative Harold M. Young relays a grisly account of jungle werewolves in the hill country of Thailand, and like Edward Lansdale's faked vampire attacks in the Philippines the story reveals more about the casual sociopathy of imperialism than about primitive monsters or native superstition. Young describes shooting a Taw werewolf and tracking the blood trail to a hut. Inside that hut is a dead man with a bullet wound, and Young's mind is boggled at the implication. We all know from the movies that dead werewolves revert to human form, so Young must have really shot a werewolf! The darkness inside modern "civilized" man is laundered through purported barbarity and illogic in the "savage" Third World.

True to form, Steiger reused the story of the Taw multiple times. Turning and turning in the widening gyre ...

The Occult in the Orient is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Popular Library, 1974.

OPERATION EARTH by Brinsley Le Poer Trench

Once again, author Brinsley Le Poer Trench wants to make it plain: gotta make way for the Homo superior! As an arch-reactionary hippie, Trench sees the New Age as an opportunity to open our minds to our lost heritage as children of the spacemen, and he links this awakening to an ancient war between the benevolent Space Brothers and malevolent imposters from beneath the Earth. Everything from the Bermuda Triangle to the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, from Atlantis to Antonio Villas-Boas, is cited as evidence in his melding of the Shaver Mystery with classic Contactee cant.

Trench is logical within the confines of the subject matter, studiously documenting his connections with an extensive bibliography. That his thesis is irrevocably cracked is only natural considering the eclectic personalities involved with the clique behind the Flying Saucer Review.

Operation Earth is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Tandem Books, 1975 (original pub. 1969)

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Mystery Animal Haunts

From an article by Charles Bowen, "Mystery Animals." Featured in the Flying Saucer Review, Volume 10 - Number 6, November/December 1964.

MYSTERIOUS VISITORS by Brinsley Le Poer Trench

Is there proof? Brinsley Le Poer Trench says "Yes!" All will be revealed, as the Sky People are coming to usher us into a New Age of enlightenment. The children of today, with their long hair and freaky clothes, are the Homo superior, and after their ascension we'll be plugged in to the Cosmic Lattice giving us access to all time and space! All this and much, much more!

Trench is no light weight, anyways, and gives us plenty to chew on. His Biblical section for example doesn't just trot out Ezekiel's wheel but assures us that Elijah, Enoch, and Moses also all had UFO experiences, and that Christ our Lord Himself was brought to heaven via flying saucer! This blockbuster Bible study is followed by a series of chapters focused on the weird behavior of modern day UFOs, with many references from the always dependable Flying Saucer Review. Next we get an abbreviated history of the modern UFO era, from the mystery airships to UMMO, and finally Trench buckles us in for his astounding revelations of our "tremendous tomorrow" among the Space Brothers.

There's some nice illustrations by one Kiril Tirzier and two appendices: a list of UFO shapes and a directory for Trench's organization Contact International.

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Day Books, 1978 (original pub. 1971)